[knzhou]

This is cool as always, but in case anybody is seriously contemplating using it: this list is infamous for its complete uselessness for anybody actually trying to learn. It's mostly recommended because of 't Hooft's name, but it doesn't reflect how he actually learned physics himself, nor how anybody ever has, really.

It's been "under construction" (i.e. completely abandoned) for two decades. Half the links are broken, and the ones that aren't tend to be whatever the top Google hit was in the 90s, not what's pedagogically best. If you're serious about learning physics, there are many much better roadmaps, like Susan Fowler's list (https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2016/8/13/so-you-want-to-l...).

[albutr]

Even better is to look up the undergrad/grad curriculum from a university and then look at the course webpages (many universities still publish their course materials available to anyone who has the link, without needing to login through canvas or a university portal). Pretty often you can get access to homeworks/exams and solutions, lecture notes, etc. in addition to seeing whatever textbook they're using.

Plus, the added benefit helping limit "analysis paralysis" from having too many possible texts to choose from yourself, just pick whatever was standard for that particular class.

[knzhou]

This is a great point. Out of all the ones I've looked into, I think MIT has by far the most complete public curriculum (because of MIT OCW), but Cambridge and Oxford are not far behind, with excellent lecture notes and problem sets.

[albutr]

Agreed, at some point I've used something from all three of those and they're all great! I've seen a surprising amount of great stuff from smaller universities too iirc, if you google around.

[fizixer]

I'm sorry I can't take Susan Fowler seriously. She claims she went from zero math knowledge (besides sixth grade) and a philosophy major to studying quantum field theory in a span of something like a year and a half [0].

If this wasn't horsesh*t to begin with, she went on to work in non-physics areas after graduation, and never did any research work in physics (no grad school either).

How convenient.

(likely explanation: either her undergrad program was super lax, passing pretty much everyone who shows up in class and exams, hence useless for a serious career in physics, or she's misrepresenting her background)

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170314073043/https://fledgling...

[knzhou]

Well, I've read almost all the books she lists and I've been a quantum field theory practitioner for years, and I can at least attest the list is good. People actually learn from these books.

I think your comment also directly illustrates what I was complaining about. You really shouldn't source learning recommendations from the highest ranking people, because these people know the least about what it's like to learn something anew. A Nobel prize doesn't automatically make somebody a good teacher.

[mnky9800n]

Carl Weiman would like to have a word with you. Ahahaa.

[jimhefferon]

Not GP but if you mean that

> A Nobel prize doesn't automatically make somebody a good teacher.

is mistaken by pointing to Weiman, could you elaborate on that, please?

[mnky9800n]

Carl took his nobel money for BEC and started a career in education and education research.

[jimhefferon]

Sure, he is admirable that way. But the comment says not necessarily, which is not a throwaway. Personally, it seems to me that being good at teaching is at the least independent of being a good researcher, if not perhaps negatively correlated. That very much does not rule out extraordinary exceptions (ones that deserve a great deal of attention, for sure).

[blueblimp]

It's believable to me that a smart+motivated person whose reason for not knowing much math is lack of formal education could catch up a lot faster than you might expect. Educational pacing is generally designed for people who aren't smart and aren't motivated, so if you're both, you can go much faster.

Additionally, she was doing this at around 22 years old, which is in the age range that your brain reaches its optimum performance at learning new things.

She also wasn't starting from sixth grade math knowledge, more like spotty knowledge: she says she had learned some logic, algebra, and set theory.

It's annoying that she characterizes herself as a person who isn't smart/mathy/etc., when her story implies she has plenty of talent for it and just lacked the formal education. The vast majority of people do get a public school education or equivalent, and if they consider themselves bad at math, it's because they were having trouble learning it. If anything the story just demonstrates the dominance of talent+motivation over amount of educational background.

Edit: To elaborate, she says she expected math to be difficult because "I had heard throughout my life that math and physics were really difficult", not because she wasn't able to do well in her math classes. She says "I had the most difficult time possible taking intro physics and the beginning calculus courses", and yeah it's going to be challenging and a lot of work, but she doesn't say her grades came out bad in the end. The takeaway _should_ be that you need to be careful with second-hand opinions about what's difficult, because people vary so much in their aptitudes and interests.

[whatshisface]

Well, there's "learn" and then there's "Learn." One of my undergraduate QFT courses was taught by a nuclear physicist who wanted to spend the whole time talking about nuclear shells and mass gaps, so he crammed all the QFT in to the last half of the semester. In a blaze of glory, we ran though a bunch of linear algebra, got showed how to do Feynman diagrams and compute cross sections, and saw some vacuum solutions for the Dirac equation. After taking that class, I wouldn't say I knew QFT, but I could say I knew QFT without lying.

If you taught someone how to do derivatives in a half-semester blaze of glory like that, I bet you could combine it with the half-semester blaze of QFT glory to technically qualify as teaching a high school student QFT in half a year.

(I don't regret the professor's decision at all, by the way, I liked the nuclear stuff.)

[naveen99]

Barton Zwiebach makes quantum mechanics pretty accessible https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9d...

[tus88]

There is a sort of qualitative approach to QFD that can abstract away the difficult math and become a sort of kids geometry game.

It's a little bit like programming Arduino using the high level scripting language and thinking your a hardware hack0r.

[oh_sigh]

Has Susan Fowler proved herself to be a good theoretical physicst? How does one determine that her roadmap is good but OPs is bad?

[knzhou]

I personally know the vast majority of the material in both roadmaps, so I know that 't Hooft's is far harder to learn from. Anybody can check this for themselves. There's plenty of broken links, extremely rough drafts of lecture notes, and wild fluctuations in sophistication. The ordering puts graduate-level stuff before its sophomore-level prerequisites.

My statement would only be controversial if you believed that arbitrary adversity in learning was necessary to be a good physicist -- and for my own sake I hope that isn't the case!

[scottlocklin]

Yeah, well, t'Hooft's is harder to learn because it's actually a serious curriculum which is worth knowing rather than training wheels from someone who never did anything serious in physics. Title is how to be a good theoretical physicist; not "what someone might study as an undergraduate."

[meroes]

I mean sure but t' Hooft also denies every interpretation of QM other than superdeterminism, which is almost anti-science (no indepedence of experimenters).

I'd rather learn mainstream before I go solo

[scottlocklin]

Susan Fowler isn't and never was a physicist. t'Hooft won the Nobel Prize in physics. The title is "how to become a good theoretical physicist" -not "what they taught me as an undergraduate." The end.

[mnky9800n]

Wtf are you talking about. All the recommendations here are look at what physics departments teach and do that. Instead of listening to some Jack ass who thinks the only real physics is theoretical physics.

[nmca]

Another good source for quantum and linear algebra in particular is "Looking glass universe" https://youtu.be/r0plv_nIzsQ